I know for my particular college's programs, the explosion of the technology and communication advances has slowly phased out some of our program offerings. Because so many industries are using computer programming to run equipment and machines, people are losing jobs. There are benefits and drawbacks to technology in this regard. On the one hand, production can be much faster, but on the other hand, people are unemployed, which is a big problem in our country considering the financial crisis it is experiencing right now.

Any new technological advancement in business will cause some dislocation as the old technology is replaced. This has happened time and time again; as an example, when robotics became sufficiently advanced, robots replaced workers on the assembly lines in Detroit. The benefits are enormous -- and so are the difficulties, chief of these being the unemployed workers who used to be on that assembly line. Such is the price of progress. It would seem the most prudent process of implementation of the new and phase out of the old would be to have procedures where the dislocation is kept to a minimum -- retraining for different (hopefully better) jobs, for example, but the impact of new technology on a workforce or business process will never be eradicated. Thankfully, it can be softened, and hopefully those that implement are aware of how important it is to support workers during that transition.

The more sophisticated and advanced the communication technology, the more jobs it might potentially replace. Therefore, there does seem to be a connection between the advancement of communication technology and unemployment.